Mapping the emotional homunculus with fMRI.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Psychophysiology

Background:

• Emotions are often described with bodily sensations, like 'boiling with anger'.
• Previous research suggests emotions link to specific body parts.
• Somatotopically organized cortical regions involved in somatosensory and motor functions may play a role in emotion generation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if subjective emotional feelings activate somatotopically defined sensorimotor brain regions.
• To explore the potential for reconstructing an "emotional homunculus" based on brain activation patterns.
• To examine the relationship between embodied emotional experiences and sensorimotor cortex activation.

Main Methods:

• Utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to observe brain activity during emotional experiences.
• Mapped brain activation patterns evoked by self-generated emotions during scanning.
• Defined the convergence of emotional activation onto a sensorimotor map derived from participants' tactile and motor brain activity.

Main Results:

• All evoked emotions activated portions of the sensorimotor map.
• Significant overlap in sensorimotor activation was observed across different emotions.
• A highly specific segmentation of discrete emotions within sensorimotor regions was not found.

Conclusions:

• The findings support the concept of an embodied experience of emotions.
• Subjective emotional feelings are associated with activation in sensorimotor brain areas.
• While not discretely mapped, emotions engage the sensorimotor system, reinforcing the mind-body connection.